Something amazing has happened in the 10 days since Joe Biden and Donald Trump faced off in a presidential debate in Atlanta: Biden has come in for the kind of coordinated onslaught from the mainstream media and Democratic power brokers that is usually reserved for Republicans. Biden’s performance allowed the audiences of CNN, MSNBC, The Washington Post, and The New York Times their first glimpse of something the journalists at those outlets had worked hard to conceal: that Biden slurs his speech, that his thoughts are erratic, his glassy gaze unfocused, his memory deeply flawed.
“You could say Biden is getting the Trump treatment.”
To punish Biden for exposing their own meretriciousness, the media have now turned against the president they once worked so hard to protect, flooding the news cycle with reports that would have been unimaginable two weeks ago. The American people have since been treated to a deluge of negative Biden coverage: not just of the president’s cognitive impairments, but also the Shakespearean power struggles in his inner orbit and his White House’s breaking of norms by feeding journalists questions ahead of interviews. You could say Biden is getting the Trump treatment.